Cultivating Positive Traits for Legal Career Success

---

Summary

• When we’re taught in textbooks to always look for the bad, we’re training our brains to look for the bad in our everyday experiences.
• Begin to work to counteract the impacts of the negative thinking you’re applying in law school.
• Take every opportunity to focus your attention on good to counter-balance the negative training of law school.

istock.com/Super Scout

Jump to:

• How a Lawyer Came to Study Lawyers
• Why Lawyers’ Brains Are Unique
• Start Shaping Your Mindset Today

---

---

Did you know that the typical lawyer has personality traits that can really propel them in their career? They also have qualities that can truly get in the way of career success. Knowing the difference can help you cultivate the most positive characteristics and mitigate the negative ones.

That’s according to the research of Dr. Larry Richard, who began his career as a litigator before earning his PhD in psychology and transitioning into work as a psychologist. Richard’s analysis of personality data from thousands of lawyers made him the leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior. He founded and is the principal of LawyerBrain LLC, where he has advised hundreds of top law firms and corporate legal departments.

---

---

---

---

How a Lawyer Came to Study Lawyers

What sparked Richard’s fascination with the lawyer’s brain? During his career, Richard sought guidance from a career counselor. That conversation marked a pivotal moment in Richard’s life and sparked a curiosity that would ultimately shape his future research.

The career counselor used a personality assessment test you’ve probably heard of, perhaps even taken—the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. To no surprise, Richard was told that his personality matches well with that of a lawyer. That wasn’t what fascinated Richard. It was the test itself that piqued his curiosity.

Richard started looking into personality assessments and concluded that the Caliper Profile Test is the most well-developed for assessing lawyers. It measures 21 personality traits and scores them on a percentage scale from 1 to 99. In most professions, scores tend to be widely distributed, forming a bell curve, with the majority falling between 40 percent and 60 percent.

Why Lawyers’ Brains Are Unique

Of course, lawyers were different. They tend to score either well below 40 percent or well above 60 percent. Specifically, lawyers score this way in seven personality traits that stood out to Richard. Lawyers score high in abstract thinking, autonomy, urgency, and skepticism but lower in sociability, empathy, and resilience.

Richard says some of the higher-scoring traits can be attributed to law school, where students learn to think critically and always look for the exception to the rule. Although this type of thinking really helps law students do well in classes, Richard believes it also comes with costs.

Learning to think this way builds neural pathways to think of negative expectations, and this sort of thinking seeps into our daily lives. When we’re taught in textbooks to always look for the bad, we’re training our brains to look for the bad in our everyday experiences.

This constant negativity builds stress and disturbs sleep. Richard notes that it’s likely the reason that lawyers are more prone to alcohol and substance abuse, depression, and are one and a half times more likely to get divorced than the general public.

With respect to lawyers’ tendency to score lower in resilience, the findings suggest that lawyers may be more “thin-skinned,” sensitive to criticism, and less adaptable to changing circumstances.

Start Shaping Your Mindset Today

The obvious questions are: What makes lawyers so thin-skinned? And is there any way to address this? In a forthcoming book, Thin-Skinned: Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience, and the New Science That Can Help, Richard and his wife, D’Arcy Lyness, also a PhD, explore the history of stress in the legal profession, examine how it has been shaped by recent changes and uncertainty, and outline 50 evidence-based self-help strategies, organized into four broad categories, to help lawyers strengthen their resilience.

What can you do to get ahead of the lawyers’ cycle of skepticism, depression, and low resilience? Richard says you begin to actively work to counteract the impacts of the negative thinking you’re applying in law school. Because negative thinking reinforces harmful neural pathways, it’s important to counteract and rebalance your brain’s chemical responses.

Richard suggests you work to build positive neural pathways by practicing gratitude, expanding your perceptions, and increasing your positive emotions. He calls it cognitive reconstruction and emphasizes that self-care is the essential first step toward cultivating a more positive mindset. He recommends getting between seven and nine hours of sleep each night, maintaining a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and engaging in consistent mindfulness practices. Only under these conditions can resilience truly develop.

Richard also suggests you take every opportunity to focus your attention on good to counterbalance the negative training of law school and to build positive neural pathways. One positive psychology exercise is 3 Good Things, in which you take five minutes a day to ask yourself: What are three good things that happened today? These can be actions you’ve taken, things you’ve seen, or moments when you were in awe.

Next, write down a word or phrase to memorialize these moments, and then take 60 seconds to meditate and appreciate the good thing you wrote down. Richard suggests doing this every night around the same time to begin building a habit that will really impact it.

This will not only boost your overall gratitude but, over time, gradually shift your thinking toward noticing the positive throughout the day—even to taking action to create positive experiences, Richard says. All this can counterbalance the negatives in your legal training and help you improve your overall sense of satisfaction.

---

Authors

Sandra Edwards

My name is Sandra Edwards and I am a 2L at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. I was born and raised in Stuart, Florida. I received my Bachelor's of Science from Central Michigan University where I studied...

View Bio →

---

Authors

Sandra Edwards

Related Content

Personal & Financial

How I Shifted from Student Athlete to Healthy Law School Student

Mar 12, 2026

Personal & Financial

How to Manage Family Expectations During Law School

Feb 11, 2026

Personal & Financial

6 Tips to Help You Stay Mentally Healthy in Law School

Dec 31, 2025

Personal & Financial

How to Thrive in Law School as an Introvert

Oct 16, 2025

Personal & Financial | Professional Development

“The Life of a Showgirl”: Lessons on Resilience and Community for Law Students

Oct 06, 2025

Personal & Financial

The Future of Law School Loans Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Jul 25, 2025